Strong Women in Sci Fi
My book’s out in paperback in THREE DAYS!! [Edit: IT’S HERE!] Thank you, Harper Voyager UK! To celebrate, I’m writing about women in science fiction. Although I maintain that there’s never been a better time to love science fiction, as fans and writers, we have decades of inspiring characters and authors to build on.
There’s been plenty of virtual ink spilled lately in response to the Strong Female Character trope karate-chopping her way though our collective culture. You know the one. She’s beautiful. She’s sassy. She’s not afraid to speak her mind, and above all, she is armed to the tips of her perfectly straight teeth.
In other words, she’s predictable, and we’re over it.
But such a protest begs a number of questions. Don’t we want Strong Women, and not just Helpless Girlfriends? Don’t we want to see girls who can rescue themselves, at least some of the time? So for those of us following along from our typewriters, it seems an impossible feat: write the perfect woman. Make her awesome. Oh, but not that awesome. Not so strong. Not so smart. And if you write for a YA audience, like I do, your task is even more fraught with peril: you’re adding a heightened sense of emotion and immediacy to your character’s interactions that adults don’t often deal with.
So here’s my personal list of the top five ways to have it both ways, with examples pulled from sci fi of the past and present:
1. Maybe this goes without saying, but let her have weaknesses. Big ones. We sci fi fans aren’t looking for a rock-solid black-belt heroine who never has a hair out of place. It’s far more interesting if she has a major blind spot with regard to another character, or struggles to think of the right thing to say, or has a tendency to lose her temper and regret it after. We’ll enjoy rooting for her so much more if she feels real. In Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonsong, Menolly is shy and doesn’t have an easy time finding human allies. She’ll never be a warrior or a queen. Her strength is that much more impressive – and her journey that much more exciting – because of her limitations.
2. Let her be the Chosen One, but make her earn it. In other words, don’t give your female character ninja skills unless she is actually a ninja. If your teenage girl’s not a fighter, then she should be losing her fights against grown men who’ve trained in combat. Sure, Katniss Everdeen is aces at archery, but her backstory holds up. If she hadn’t known her way around a bow and arrow, her family would have starved. By the time we’re introduced, she’s been hunting game for years. So when she shoots an apple from a significant distance, it’s exciting. We’re surprised, given the context, but we’re not incredulous.
3. For the love of Athena, GIVE HER SOME FEMALE FRIENDS AND ALLIES. (Lookin’ at you, Rogue One.) The best part about having multiple female characters is that you no longer have one character representing all of womankind. I mean, that’s a lot of pressure, right? But if there are many women in the story, your protagonist’s flaws are hers alone. In Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred, Dana, a modern-day black woman, is thrown hundreds of years into the past along with her white husband. While she struggles to reunite with him and escape from an obsessive slaver, she befriends the women living on a plantation. This is, for me, the heart of the story. More than her interactions with any other characters, this is what gives her – and by extension, us – the context we need to care about the characters and to understand the horrors they face. It’s also what gives her the strength she needs to pull through the second act.
4. Give her some male allies, too, and make sure she appreciates them as equals. Hermione isn’t the protagonist, obviously, but her interactions with Harry Potter are some of the best in the series.
5. Let her be ugly, if that’s what the story needs. I find it fascinating when a writer gives a female character a physical flaw. My favorite example of this is CS Lewis’s final, most complex novel Till We Have Faces. Lewis consulted his wife, author Joy Davidman, extensively in writing it, and it’s their take on the Cupid and Psyche myth told through the eyes of Psyche’s older, unloved sister Orual. Orual spends her childhood devoid of affection, as her father only values his daughters for their appearances, and Orual is unattractive. When she becomes queen, she makes the decision to live the rest of her life behind a veil, forcing those who surround her and serve her to judge her based on her strengths and weaknesses as a leader alone. Once she has freed herself from their gaze, she becomes an accomplished scholar and strategist, but for most of her life she is unable to escape her bitterness and insecurity. It’s a deeply emotional story with a profoundly complicated protagonist, and it wouldn’t have been possible had she been pretty.
There you go! But my list is far from complete, and of course, it’s subjective. So what traits are you most excited about in a female character? Are they the same as the traits you look forward to reading about in a male character? Drop me a line and let me know!
The final book in The Ark Trilogy, THE FALL, is out in paperback on June 28, and if you’re in the UK, you can preorder here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0008181489/ref=nosim/authordatabase
Here’s the link for the US!: https://www.amazon.com/The-Fall-Ark-Trilogy/dp/0008181489/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=
It’s the end of the line for Charlotte Turner, but she’s not going down without a fight. Obviously.
- Laura :)
